AIDS Trails, Pea Patches and things we can do.

I was allotted a P-Patch today! It's 10'x10' only 8 blocks from my apartment! For those of you who don't know, a P-Patch is an urban/community garden plot. There are all of these community gardens all across the city and I signed up for one last spring/summer. Of course I was too late to get in on it last year and I barely made the registration deadline this fall (I called in on Friday at 5:30 p.m. after offices were closed) but I got in and today was awarded my very own spot! (I love dirt!) The funny thing is I don't come from a family of gardeners. My mother always assigned me to weeding the flowerbeds as one of my chores and after griping about it enough, I eventually found great peace and quiet in weeding. (It was funny, she asked me a few summer ago how I became so good with plants and I sighed - all of those summer you made me weed, I read the little tabs with the plants and learned about them.) So now I have my own patch, with community tools to share... I can't wait to plant basil, carrots, tomatoes, peas... yum!

A month ago a community educator from the HIV Vaccine Trails Unit spoke at the PPWW Young Professionals meeting. He was dynamic and passionate, hilarious and charming, in his enthusiastic speech about the HIV Vaccine Trail. I had seen a bus ad for it when I first moved to Seattle, read more about it at the AIDS Walk in the summer and it wasn't until I heard David talk about it that I remembered I was so interested in it. I decided a few weeks ago to volunteer for it. You are not given a live virus or even a dead one. Three (3) pieces of man-made DNA are spliced into another virus (common cold) and you are injected with it to see if your body builds any kind of response to it. It was a year long study and I thought, I am, sadly, NEVER going to be a research scientist and find a cure for this horrible disease that has seemingly impacted so much of my life from growing up in the 80's to its horrible effects on my communities in the Peace Corps. so I might as well volunteer for a possible vaccine - at the very least.

It turns out that I am short on Adenovirsus antibodies (which mainly cause respiratory infections) which mean NOTHING about my general health as anything 2/3 of Americans don't have them (but they wanted volunteers with these antibodies present for this study). So I'm going to have to wait until July to become a part of another study. In some respects, as a healthy young woman, its the very least I can do.

Some people find it courageous to do something like be a part of a vaccine study... but there are a million things we can do like eat tasty meals at our local restaurant and Dine Out for Darfur which in Seattle will be held on Tuesday, April 3rd. I don't have a scheduled skate practice that night so some friends and I are going to go out and eat... not from the P-Patch just yet, but for an even better cause.